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September 04, 2018

Pre-fall Preternature

Alison Blickle 2018

It's been quite a summer. It took me to Missouri, Maine, and Minnesota, as well as some lovely trips to upstate New York to get some research and writing done for my book. Speaking of which: I handed in the first draft to my editor last week (eek!), so now enjoying a very small intermission before I dive back in for edits and rewrites. It's been an intense process, but I'm getting excited to share the results with you next year. More on that front soon!

In the meantime, there is so much magical stuff happening over the next month and beyond. Here are some of the things that are currently making me sigh and swoon:

Alison Blickle's new show The Myth of Inanna opens at Kravets Wehby Gallery on Sept 6th and is up through Oct 13th. I've loved her hyper-patterned occult starlets for years, and can't wait to see this series, which is loosely based on stories about the Sumerian goddess.

SPELLBOUND: Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft is up now at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and I am hoping beyond hope that I'll be able to see it in person before it closes on January 6th. It has over eight centuries of magical artifacts on display, and is getting rave reviews already.

Long-overlooked surrealist, Gertrude Abercrombie, is finally getting her due, courtesy of a nearly 70 piece retrospective up now at Karma. There will also be a related monograph being released in October.

Sun Worship and Solar Machines is a group show about sun magic which is up now at Boston's Assemblage, FPAC at Envoy Hotel through Oct 6th. It's curated by Kari Adelaide and Max Razdow, and features work by some of my favorite artists such as Jesse Bransford and David Shaw. Furthermore, my favorite playwright, Matthew Freeman, is writing a short piece for the show, which will be performed on Saturday, Sept 16th at 2pm.

Photographer Frances F. Denny's new show of portraits, Major Arcana: Witches in America will be up at ClampArt from Oct 4th through Nov 24th. I'm very honored to have been included in this series, and to have sat for such a gifted photographer (and I'm also truly dazzled by the company I'm in.)

Julie Heffernan's new show, Hunter Gatherer, is up now through Oct 6th at PPOW. It contains her signature festooned self-portraits, this time commenting on the proliferation of imagery that fills our conscious and unconscious minds. Looks magnificent per usual.

Thrilled to see that another of my favorite lady surrealists is getting more love: Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire 1930-1990 will be up at NYC's Museum of Sex from Sept 28 through Mar 4th. It is being billed as "the first American museum survey" of her work, and will feature paintings, illustrations, costume designs and more.

So happy Harry Potter: A History of Magicwill be coming to the states. It will be up at the New York Historical Society from Oct 5 through Jan 27. Per the show description, it: "combines century—old treasures including rare books, manuscripts, and magical objects from the collections of the British Library and New-York Historical Society—with original material from Harry Potter publisher Scholastic and J.K. Rowling’s own archives."

I'm also thrilled that magical-realist film about Zambian witch camps, I AM NOT A WITCH, is finally opening this month in the US. And I'm even more thrilled that I'll be hosting a screening of it at Alamo Yonkers with Mitch Horowitz on Sunday, Sept 16th at 7:30pm. We'll be having a short conversation about contemporary witch hunts after the screening as well. Tickets available soon, so watch this space!here now!

In further personal news, I really enjoyed being a guest on Jason Louv's Ultraculture podcast recently. We got into a really great discussion about witchcraft and gender, so I hope you dig listening to it as much as I dug doing it.

Sabat Magazine's major arcana deck, Le Tarot de L’étoile Cachée is available now. I wrote the guidebook for it and the unbelievably talented Elisa Seitzinger did the art. It is even more shiny (literally!) and beautiful than I imagined.

The latest trailer for Luca Guadagnino's SUSPIRIA is so gorgeous and terrifying and TILDA TILDA TILDA. And Thom Yorke's new song, Suspirium, from his soundtrack is streaming now. He also was quoted as saying that writing the score was "a form of making spells." Welcome to the club, Thom!